The JALT CALL Journal
Vol. 1, No. 2, August 2005, pp. 75-86
[Paginated
PDF Version]
Al-Maqha:
A
Low-Tech
Web
Café
for
Foreign
Language
Learners
Helle Lykke Nielsen,
Gunna Funder Hansen & Maria Kyung Overgaard
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Introduction:
Arabic has become an important foreign language in many European and American universities. The number of students has grown steadily over the last decade, and though the September 11th attack undoubtedly had an impact on university students’ interests in Middle Eastern studies in general, the interest in learning Arabic as a foreign language began well before that: Recent figures from American universities show an increase of 92.5% between 1998 and 2002 – from 5505 to 10596 students (Allen, 2004, p. 275) – and a similar development has taken place in Europe. Among the foreign language studies at University of Southern Denmark, Arabic is now second only to English when it comes to numbers of students, and languages like German, French and Spanish, which traditionally played a major role until the mid 1990s, only attract about half of the number of students studying Arabic today.